Uganda parliament tables bill to kill gays and lesbians

The press in Uganda this week is awash with homophobic hysteria against Gays, Lesbians, Bi-Sexual and Transgender (GLBT) Ugandans. This overt and shameless discrimination against a minority population of our citizens flows from the fact homosexuality is criminalised in Uganda. As if this was not enough suppression of personal freedom and civil rights, Ndorwa West Member of Parliament (MP), David Bahatia, has tabled a private member’s bill proposing a series of measures to control and punish GLBT activities in the country, including the death penalty for gays and lesbians caught living and expressing their sexuality.

This is not only cavalier violations of human rights, but a dangerous hate campaign and incitement to harm or kill members of the GLBT in Uganda. The people of Uganda, and all people of good will, must not sit and watch while this happens. The sponsors of the bill, their supporters and political leaders- inside and outside parliament- must be identified, isolated and ostracised by the entire civilised world that respect difference and diversity. Most democratising societies have laws that criminalise purveyors of hate and incitement of hatred against a person, persons or communities; and have robust bill of rights that protect citizens and minorities. Uganda should not be an exception.

However, it is not surprising that the state should be seeking such kind of personal control, to the extent of wanting to police what people do in their bedrooms, and who else they do it with and whether their partners are of the skirt or trouser wearing sorts.

First, this comes about because of the nature and character of the Ugandan state: it is a military dictatorship that shot its way to and kept itself in power by military force. What there is in terms of a fledgling parliamentary democracy is sheer gloss of veneer for the consumption of the democratic tourist. For twenty years (20) it outlawed political parties and suppressed freedoms of association and assembly, and the press is routinely knuckled. It rules by decree, not through free and open, well informed debate in a deliberative, democratic process. Therefore, like all autocrats, the Ugandan ruling clique is not about to deviate from the age-old practice of control and micromanagement of all the affairs of state, and particularly the censorship and directing of the thoughts and behaviour of its citizens. Control freaks love uniformity but are threatened by freedom, diversity, and difference.

The second reason why the hate campaign against GLBT is not surprising is that most of those connected to state power, for instance Nsaba Buturo & Co. are born-again, rigid, fundamentalist, revivalist Christians who bring to the public policy process and the management of state affairs, their religious bigotry that they pass off as public morality and ethics. They completely ignore the fact that although Uganda is a majority Christian nation-state, there are people of other faiths, as well as non-believers, to whom the Muslim and Christian moralities they are so quick to refer to, cannot and should not apply. In any case, the Ugandan state is separate from the Church or Mosque, and it would be prudent for public servants to refrain from using and imposing the teachings and morals of one religion on the diverse people of Uganda, with pluralities of religion, faith, spiritual and moral inclinations.

Obviously, their positions on GLBT people are directly lifted from the dispositions and teachings of their churches. We all recall the continuing controversy over ordination of gay priests and the blessing of gay marriages in the worldwide Anglican Communion which has caused serious doctrinal and church practice schism between conservative and liberal wings of the church. It is this struggle into which the secular state is being enlisted. The democratic forces and the people of Uganda must oppose this interference, attempt to suppress our civil rights, and fuse the state with the church. The state and the public policy process must be inoculated from religious particularities.

But the NRM/A dictatorship have aligned its position on GLBT practices with church conservatives who reject a more liberal interpretation of Christian doctrinal positions on homosexuality. Not only do church conservatives oppose the admission and ordination of homosexuals, but even women bishops and ministers within the communion are unacceptable. Furthermore, they insist that, marriage is only possible between a man and a woman, and for the purpose of procreation. Anything outside of this is regarded as unnatural and irredeemable sin.

Some in this debate do not even seem to be aware that with advancement in reproductive technology, you do not need to marry anybody's son or daughter in order to have children of your own. So the thought that promoting homosexuality threatens the human race is all gibberish

There is already a bustling market and brisk business in human eggs and semen, which may account for more than 1% of some country's total births. All one has to have is the ability to purchase such services. Most of this has been to help heterosexual couples who cannot have children the natural and normal way. Moreover, those who do not want their wives to go through the barbaric “natural” processes of pregnancy and childbirth can rent a womb -euphemistically termed surrogate motherhood-for another woman to carry their child to term. Others may conceive naturally and carry their own babies to term, but opt for caesarean births.

All these are done sometimes for health reasons, but in most cases, it is for cosmetic and aesthetics fancifulness. Some go through the procedure so their wives are not aged and disfigured by the vagaries of childbirth. It is the same reason other women do not breastfeed so their breasts can remain firm longer. Such lifestyles and personal choices, and the technological response to problems within heterosexual relationships have also been serendipitous for gay couples who, like their heterosexual counterparts, want children and a fulfilling family life.

Personally, homosexuality is not for me. However, that is not sufficient reason for me to categorize it as a sin or a crime; even less so, to hate or incite hatred against those who practise it. I unconditionally accept and respect those who find themselves inclined that way, and I would even forgo my rights, if it would ensure that their civic and human rights are protected as much as mine and the next wo/man. This is because there is nothing-scientific or spiritual- and I do not think there will be any-to suggest that GLBT people are less human, less civic citizens than I am and undeserving of the moral, legal, and constitutional protection and social privileges heterosexuals claim for themselves.


To understand the silliness of those who hate others just because they do not look or behave like them, it may be useful to look at sexuality as being akin to the diversity of food culture. We would all be happier if we recognised the wisdom in the axiom that one wo/man's meat is another wo/man's poison. I came face to face with this truism in travelling and living among people from southern Africa-Zambia, Botswana, Malawi and Bophutoswana. Caterpillar is to these communities what white ants and grasshoppers are to Ugandans. And not to speak about the food and food culture of Europe and North America that even grossed me out the most. I won’t be caught dead eating frogs, snails, mussels, squids or jelly fish!

Close to home in Acholi itself, food culture varies from region to region. For instance, the Lamogi in Amuru are reputed for eating bats; the Padibe in Kitgum are famous for eating certain species of rats. To those from Agoro the northern most towns in Kitgum, from where my own mother came, crabs are delicacies- which my own people from Madi Opei detest vehemently and ridicule them for it. The point is that, throughout the world, food is food and what does not kill you, must certainly be good for you and welcome nourishment for your body, mind, and soul.

So sexuality itself, although not as voluntary as eating foods choices and culture is, its variety is certainly not unlike our national or global food culture. For instance, in Uganda, we have a diversity of sex culture within the heterosexual communities. In Makerere University lingo past, we used to say in Western Uganda, they do it with low-technology, shallow quarrying, with very little ecological footprints. On the other hand, eastern and northern parts of the country were categorised as being partial to deep-shaft mining and technology intensive. The point I am labouring to make here is that, it is unreasonable to think that what is not good for you, must not be good for someone else and vice versa. Or that we should imagine some dictator from Rwakitura banning Kwete, Ajon, Mwenge Migu, Kongo Ting, and decreeing god-knows-what as the “natural” drink for Ugandans!

Homosexuality is not a crime. Those who practise it do not harm anyone, when it is done between or among consenting adults. Violating minors or gaining carnal knowledge of minors is defilement and rape. Equally, having sex with adults against their will, regardless of their sex and gender, is rape and criminal. It does not matter whether the perpetrator and victim are heterosexuals or homosexuals; defilement or rape is defilement or rape; it is criminal and punishable. But no crime, even for rape, should be punishable by death among human communities living in the 21st Century.
Rationally, one would expect that Ugandans should be more tolerant and accepting of difference and diversity, since they have gone through two or more episodes of tragic violence and persecution based solely on identity, difference, and diversity. But the latest upsurge of hate campaigns by ministers, clergy, and their brainwashed religious cult communicants against homosexuality, makes it feel like we live in the times of Jesus and we were witnessing animated polemical debates between the Pharisees, the Sadducees and Christian adherents at Jewish temples and market places in AD 47.

Unfortunately in this debate, Africans have overplayed the mythologies of creationism and the bible is wielded as the answer to all our problems, struggles and interpretations of events and as sole source for moral rectitude. This has constricted and enfeebled our minds and given us up to irrational fears of difference and the unknown and surrender to fatalism. It is the reason no significant progress will come out of Africa, because we have erected a ring fire of religious and social taboos around our lives and thoughts, that venturing beyond is not only terrifying, but patrolled and policed by authoritarians like the NRM/A who hold us hostage to the myth that human progress beyond where we are in Uganda and Africa, is impossible. And that they must chaperone us on around, including how we express our sexuality which is an entirely private and personal matter in which the state has no business acting like a voyeur.

Our progress will begin with not being content with and challenging the ordinary and venturing into the realms of self-doubt and religious scepticism. Until Ugandan Christians can interpret their experiences and aspirations not only on the teachings and morals of the bible but also on factual and observed phenomena and material life- outside the mysticisms of Christianity, we will have to put another two thousand years behind us before we can break free of the shackles and limitations of mysticisms, nature, and social taboos.

It is not scientific, but a cursory observation would reveal that societies that have fewer sexual, social and personal taboos, have made tremendous progress and have shown greater imagination, ingenuity, innovations and inventiveness among their population. They cherish freedom of thought and respect civil liberties. Conversely, societies such as Uganda, where one man is in charge of awarding market tenders from Rukingiri to Lira and his word is the law; or where vice chancellors or chancellors of national universities are political appointees rather than meritorious professionals recognised in their fields and elevated by a professional body and academic peers, the degree of restrictions on personal freedoms and civil liberties have direct relationships with the state of scientific research, social development, ingenuity, curiosity and intellectual debate on matters of public policy and interest.

Given the state of our social, economic, and political development, homosexuality is the least of our worries and vices in Uganda, than irrational religious dogmas and the cooptation of the church, or one faith, to certify public moralities in a plural society. All human rights, democracy and civil liberties advocates worth their names; and every Ugandan citizen who loves personal freedom, ought to oppose the Anti Homosexuality Bill which is nothing but the expansion of the mechanisms of limiting all our civil liberties and personal freedoms.

However, the bill provides welcome opportunity for Ugandans to begin a robust national conversation on the protection of civil rights, which ensures that there is no discrimination based on race, colour, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion, and party affiliation or political views, in the public domain. Such civil rights debate must endeavour to entrench the separation of the state from the church and uphold the integrity of Uganda as a secular state with plurality of faith and spiritual practices and without an official state religion.

In that regard, ministers, parliamentarians and other public servants should be prohibited from imposing Christian or Islamic ethics and moralities on the state and public; or to use their personal and private belief systems and morality as the basis for national, public policy, on matters outside the regulation of religious practices. Once we can ensure these, clowns like Nsaba Buturo, will think otherwise about flogging their personal beliefs and religious dogmas to restrict and control our bodies and personalities.

Ugandans and all people of good will should wake up and see Yoweri Museveni and the NRM/A government and its agents for who they are: Purveyors of hate, who have no qualms about killing those who disagree with them or are unlike themselves. No doubt, they are more dangerous to the people of Uganda, than gays and lesbians.

Who doubts Kabaka Mutebi is a "mad Jaruo"?

Sometime last year, President Yoweri Museveni reprised the ethnographic genealogies of Uganda’s ruling monarchies. In his adversarial stand-off with the Buganda monarchy, he derisively dismissed the Tooro, Bunyoro, and Buganda ruling houses as “Luo”. Gen. Museveni sounded to use “Luo”, derogatorily. As if anticipating spirited Ganda denials, the president pre-emptively challenged them to contradict him on whether “Wang Kac”, a clearly Lwo phrase, imprinted at the entrance to ancient Buganda palace gate, was in Luganda.

Apparently, unlike the Christian God, and the Chosen Galilean Son, who has been “blind”, “deaf,” and has “absconded” for two thousand and nine years, the Luo Gods were not asleep when President Museveni spoke. Suddenly, a national, regional and international constellation of “Luo Stars”, which would include Kabaka Mutebi of Buganda, began to align in ways that has thrown a gauntlet to President Museveni’s 23 years of unbroken autocracy. Even moderate, perennially neutral voices such as columnists Opiyo Oloya and Onyango Obbo, who have sometimes given the president surprisingly good press over the years, seem to have final drafts of his political obituary on their desktops.

For as long as dictator Museveni has been in power, Joseph Kony, at once and the same time the most famous, infamous and notoriously aberrant, outlier of the “Luo Stars”, has been a thorn at President Museveni’s triumphalist backside. But as far as conventional politics and opposition go, the 1980s and 1990s saw the courageous activisms of The Iron Lady, Hon. Cecilia Ogwal, Hon. Okello Okello, Hon. Reagan Okumu, Hon. Norbert Mao, and compatriot Joseph Ochieno. In academia, Professor Oloka Onyango led the troops. These were times when criticizing the NRM/A was as appropriate as members of the Christian Congregations asking their priests questions, on theological interpretations and canonical practices, after the Sunday sermon. The only critical voice that was expected, but also curtly dismissed, was that of the UPC leadership and Milton Obote in exile.

Fortunately for President Musevni, these groups of internal critics were easy to contain, through draconian constitutional provisions that outlawed political parties, and establish a de facto military government and police state, which severely controlled information and political spaces outside of the ruling NRM/A. As for Milton Obote and his lieutenants such as Messers Ochieno and Yoga Adhola, who were in exile and outside the reach of the dictatorship in Kampala, past national tragedies and Luwero massacres were always conveniently available to hang onto their necks and weigh like a millstone, on their political and democratic credibility scales.

But a year or so since President Museveni mocked Buganda and its “Luo” Monarchy, a vengeful, improvident god seems to have captured his soul and subversively taken control of his fate. Ominously to the east, rose Raila Odinga. Prime Minister Odinga’s rise to the Kenyan presidency was thwarted by open, day light robbery, apparently with the alleged collusion of the Ugandan ruler. President Museveni, like Kabaka Muwanga before him in the late 19th Century, seemed to have worried that a destructive force that might subject his presidency to ruins would come from the east. Therefore, as Bishop Hannington was for Kabaka Muwanga, so was Raila Odinga for Gen. Museveni, and his political ambitions needed to be stopped at all cost.

As if suspicion of a less than enamoured Premier Odinga with Museveni’s uncontested regional and continental leadership pretensions were not enough, the humourless fishermen of Migingo Island on Lake Victoria threw a barren rock into the bubbling political cauldron. The splash, political tête-à-têtes and undiplomatic war of words that ensued between Kampala and Nairobi, drove President Museveni to unguardedly dismiss his detractors as “Mad Jaruos”-translation: his Luo critics are mad people. This was clearly a variation on Karusoke’s classification of northerners as mere “biological substances” deserving no moral considerations.

Just after Prime Minister Raila Odinga rose in the east, another “Luo Star” was rising in the northern horizon. President Museveni’s oracles seemed to have been wrong after all, about an only easterly “malevolent” portend.

Beating the odds, that even Gen. Museveni had recognised and hoped were insurmountable, the ascension of the mere “Junior Senator” from Illinois to the US presidency, foreclosed on Uganda’s equivocations and Enron-like leveraged, democratic defalcations. With Barack Obama in Washington, junior members of the Coalition of the Willing (COW) like President Museveni, suddenly saw their political stock values tumble much lower than they had been trading for under President Bush. Henceforth, they would still stand in line for largesse from Washington, but now they would also be held to account, and expected to give convincing narrative reports of their internal political and democratic balance sheets.

Even as the surprise new power in Washington, and the other one-half of authority in Nairobi, were less than enthusiastic towards the twenty-three year fixture in Kampala, there was very little they could go on to directly shore up democratic internal opposition to the dictatorship. The conventional political opposition in Uganda was more than content to accept and play within the arbitrary rules Gen. Museveni had set for them. Hence, instead of taking proactive actions, Uganda’s opposition made a virtue out of the formalism of court challenges and reactive politics. They were more than satisfied with symbolic moral victories they could draw from sympathetic words of one or two minority judgement rulings in their favour, despite the fact the status quo remained as Museveni intended.

That was until; mysteriously a third “Luo star”, Olara Otunnu, for long maligned by Yoweri Museveni, hurtled out of his straight jacketed diplomatic orbit at the UN, and began to speak more candidly and with political overtones for the world’s children, as well as about the democratic deficit and retail politics in his homeland.

As the former UN diplomat retched up his criticisms of Gen. Museveni for plunging Uganda into a “deep national crisis”, and embarked on a nation-wide tour to proclaim a new national democratic consensus, the Kabaka of Buganda, Ronald Mutebi, seemed to have reached deep into his being to summon up the characteristic “Luo” spirit of resistance to injustice and personal humiliation, to tell President Museveni, enough was enough.

After three or more years of suffering in silence as he saw his Kingdom being dismantled piece by piece, and acre by acre, the Kabaka finally put his foot down over Kayunga. The rest, as we will forever remember as the Kabaka Riots of 2009, is history.

If anyone had doubted the Baganda royals were “Luo”, Kabaka Mutebi did give them food for thought. He did not wilt in the face of terror. Instead, he gently and softly spoke truth to power; as did his “Luo” ancestors before him; who never were given to suffering personal humiliation and injustice passively.

Clearly, the intersection of national, regional and international politics, and their aggregated consequences, including the recent Kayunga stirrings in Buganda, must make Gen. Museveni wish that he had not taunted and woken up the slumbering “Luo” gods and “Luo” mettle in Kabaka Mutebi.

As the dynamics of international, regional and national politics begin to change, the quandary for President Museveni immediately is that it is difficult enough to be expected to begin to learn to work collaboratively and horizontally with other partners like the Kabaka as equals. It is equally humiliating, if you were Yoweri Museveni, and you had gotten used to hierarchical, command and control military style of leadership; especially if you were the one barking the commands. Because all of a sudden, you must now find creative ways to make nice with President Obama, Prime Minister Odinga, Kabaka Mutebi, as well as delicately offset the infectious impact of the diminutive Ambassador Olara Otunnu who, pound for pound, is certainly hitting ten times above his weight division (if physique counted for anything in politics).

For President Museveni, knowing you are no longer the favourite “new breed” of African leader in Washington; or recognising that Nairobi is no longer the home away- from- home that it once was in the 1980s for the once lanky guerrilla leader, do make for a lonely and isolated living at State House. However, such is less sleep-depriving than the spectre of having to simultaneously fight political enemies in the White House, Nairobi, Mengo; or stomach the extremely galling prospects of the “dead” UPC rising from its ashes like the legendary sphinx; as Olara Otunnu, with the smile of a Cheshire cat on his face, cheekily shakes his magic wand around the country.

So when President Museveni, in frustration blurted out the famous “ those mad Jaruos” at a press conference in Dar es Salaam, he did not have in mind the hapless Kenyans in the slums of Kibera, Nairobi, or angry western Kenyans, who had uprooted railway lines and blocked commercial road traffic to Uganda. Neither did he mean the pesky Kenyan fishermen of Migingo Island. The president was expressing deep anguish at the networks of influential “Luo” figures in politics, the press, academia, civil society and international diplomacy that have descended on and encircled him nationally, regionally, and internationally, like a wounded prey.

This is not to say it is some global Luo ethnic ganging-up against President Museveni. But rather that the Luo are known to be honest, just and fair in their dealings with others, and always on the right and just side of history. Their most recent history in East Africa is littered with heroes like Tom Mboya, Robert Ouko, Archbishop Janani Luwum, Erinayo Oryema, and Oboth Ofumbi, to mention but six.

The ultimate conundrum is: Having stirred the hornet’s nest with his own two sickly hands, can the “Lubengo” porter with shining pate, bundle and carry-like a valiant contestant in the “World’s Strongest Man” competition- the combined weight of three Os, an M, and a throne, across the finish lines, and ahead of the pack, in 2011?